Forrester's "Empowering Customers by Transforming Business Processes"

Customers today have more power than ever before. They have tremendous influence and reach through social media, more purchasing options and choices of whom to buy from, and high expectations about customer service. Enterprises must embrace this new reality, instead of merely wishing this trend would go away or attempting change that is driven by a penny-pinching focus only on costs. To thrive in this new era of the customer, companies must:

embrace customer empowerment by focusing on business process transformation from the outside in;

make the customer experience a high priority;

use change management to move the organization to a culture of customer centricity;

elevate social media to the status of a standard communication channel; and